I’ve recently read this article about the Curiosity Mars Rover, and I was actually pretty interested to see how much time it would take just to move the rover a short distance. I completely understand the intentions, though. Every so often, the Rover’s going to stop and analyze the environment around it to see if it can spot anything. This means that it will take almost a year to reach this place called Mount Sharp on Mars, which is only about 8 kilometres away. Apparently, each time the Rover stops and analyses its surroundings, it’ll take about a couple of weeks to do so.
It’s absolutely incredible to think of the scale of an operation like this. At its closest, Mars is about 56 million kilometres away, so it’s actually amazing to think that we got there in only 8 months (That’s, at it’s slowest, almost 10000 km per hour). The fact that everything was still in order after 8 months in the most hostile environment imaginable is testament to the skill of the engineers.
I was really interested to see the method with which Curiosity landed. It was a rather long and involved process, but this video explains it really well:
I can’t imagine the thought process that would go into someone coming up with that particular way of landing, but it’s very, very clever.
So obviously, there have been rovers on Mars before, Spirit and Opportunity being the most famous of these. But as amazing as Rovers are, it would be even more amazing to get a man on Mars. And one of Curiosity’s missions is to find the amount of radiation on the planet Mars to see whether humans on Mars is possible. I certainly hope so. The day we land a man on another planet will certainly be one of the most important days in human history.
By the way, if you want to see a panorama of the Martian landscape, click here
Abzonnian Ramblings 